Here is this week’s news round-up for home business, micro business, sole-traders, freelancers, self-employed and any one who is interested in small business news from India:

Microfinance: A Remedy for Poverty of Just Another Business: For example, in Bangladesh, a group of five women would apply for a loan and work with eight other such groups, in a centre of 40, to invest in a small business of their own. …Poverty alleviation is, in my opinion, the essential issue that needs to be resolved before India’s problems with corruption, literacy and human rights. This is why when effective schemes such as Yunus’s microfinance idea come along, they have to be implemented with great precision to avoid its

Business Scene (Plumas County News): BANK EXPANDS SBA OFFERINGS In ongoing effort to further develop small business lending in all their markets, Plumas Bank announced that Robert Porter and Colleen McDonald have joined the small business lending group as vice president/business development and SBA processing specialist, respectively.

SAP sinks teeth into rich SME pie (ARNnet): Business Scene: SAP wants a bigger piece of the large and potentially lucrative SME (small and medium-size enterprise) market for business software to fuel the company’s growth moving ahead.

5 lakh SMEs face deep perilAn industry association of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) fears that as many as 5,00,000 units face closure in 2009 as a result of the global crisis, with the prospect of lockouts driven by a demand crunch hitting a sector that provides jobs to more than 2.8 crore people in 30 lakh firms that account for 40 per cent of government levies.

Govt wants 10% of banks’ priority sector credit to SMEs: The government and the Reserve Bank are discussing the matter on a constant basis and is likely to come out with a decision in the near future, secretary to the ministry of micro, small and medium enterprises, Dinesh Rai told reporters. Presently, banks are required to keep atleast 40 per cent of their total loan disbursal to the priority sector which includes the micro-institutions in the country.

Telegraph: IT potentially more damaging than Red Tape for Home & Small Business.: The Telegraph Newspaper has today published an interview with WinWeb’s Founder & CEO Stefan Töpfer, in which it picks up on the fact that spending your time on IT-information technology chores can be just as damaging for small business as red-tape. These activities are often very time consuming and the business owner loses business focus.

As always this list is not exhaustive, but I hope it will give you a little overview. — ST.